Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  The backup video feed was lit with a green overlay, guiding me toward atmospheric insertion. A simplified data feed scrolled down, giving me the data I needed to avoid skipping off into space or smacking into the atmosphere at supersonic speeds and splattering like a bug before bursting into flames.

  I was betting that the Gaethe scout ship wouldn’t be able to follow me, not easily. Being far more advanced than we humans, the Gaethe didn’t rely on things like chemical propellant or using friction to slow down when landing on a planet. They manipulated gravity, which meant slowing down in space before trying to land.

  The great irony being, in this specific scenario, primitive was good. I’d be halfway across a continent before the scout ship could reorient and move to catch me.

  Entry itself wasn’t too bad. The backup computer was designed to handle it, and this was something human ships had been doing for a couple centuries. The process came with some neat modern advances as well.

  The heat shield expanded from multiple small ports, an aerogel envelope with thin but tough structural members keeping it semi-rigid. The gel was pretty tough all on its own, resisting the massive shearing forces as air piled up beneath it.

  My ship angled itself perfectly, but the keening whistle of air rushing over damaged hull resonated through my pod. The Val had taken a beating. I hoped desperately it wasn’t so bad she’d tear herself apart.

  I’ve seen the old movies. Hell, I’ve seen almost every movie made about space travel. It was in that moment, as the ship shook and groaned around me, the vibrations building as tortured metal struggled to maintain its shape, that I understood the difference between the people in those films and me. I don’t mean the actors, you understand, but the people they represented.

  Every astronaut, cosmonaut, and explorer by any other name came from a place where going into space was so difficult and dangerous that death was understood as a likely outcome. Those people had endured the terror of materials stress, system strain, and crushing physical forces because they knew those things were the natural byproducts of their efforts. For me, the intense lateral vibrations of my ship were new, terrifying, and a sign that things had gone horribly wrong for my mission.

  For those early astronauts, it had been another day at the office.

  My teeth rattled inside my helmet and a dark blur passed by the camera as a piece of hull plating peeled back and flew off. Just as quickly as I convinced myself this was it, that I was going to die, the clamor reached its peak and began to subside. Two seconds later an indicator in my field of vision alerted me that Jax was about to reboot.

  I took those few seconds to enjoy the view.

  Nine

  Jax woke up and restored my interface with the ship and man, I was fucked.

  Every system screamed at me that it was in bad shape. The reentry—or really, just entry since this was my first visit—had the same effect as a bag full of hammers would on the existing damage. Alarms fought for my attention like a classroom full of bored children, but I had Jax silence them one by one. Yes, my ship was rattling apart around me. No, I couldn’t do anything about it while screaming through the atmosphere.

  When my airspeed slowed enough to allow it, Jax did something surprising and incredibly useful. The stubby fins added to the tail end of the ship for this mission expanded, pieces sliding forward and carefully interlocking to give the Val actual wings. Not the sort you’d see on normal, terrestrial aircraft, but definitely better than the tapered cylinder shape my boat usually sported.

  Hard as it was for me to do, I let Jax take the wheel. I wasn’t a stranger to landings or even flying through an atmosphere, but this was well outside my experience. The damage to the ship, which thankfully didn’t include the fusion reactor, created too many variables for me to handle. My reflexes might be more than human average, but I didn’t hold a candle to Jax’s reaction time.

  I switched through the feeds as Jax worked, trying to get a sense of how deeply screwed I was. The news was mixed. The main components of the drive systems were intact, but the most of the lines which fed them had some degree of damage. The sensor arrays had ragged gaps torn in them, the outer hull was pocked with holes. My pod had endured the heat and air resistance during entry like a champ, though the stress was enough to break off the plugs formed by the escaping liquid, draining it even more.

  I ordered Jax to find a safe spot and get us to the ground and got a ping of acknowledgment in return.

  Jax managed to get the gravity drive online, though it wasn’t operating anywhere near capacity. I ignored the complicated math in front of me explaining the relationship between power output in the gravity drive in relation to the strength and length of the gravitational tether it could create and focused on the end result. Which, much to my surprise, was good news. We could hook onto the moon. Good old Luna.

  It wasn’t enough to get us back to space, but the tether reduced our gravitational attraction to Earth by about a fifth, which was helpful. Jax fed me a projection of our course, landing zone, and all the local information he could find. It was going to be rough, no way around it. Usually I’d use the tether to sit the Val down with a feather touch. That not being an option, Jax would slow us down and stop us using good old-fashioned friction. It was something I like to think of as the Let’s Hope God Loves Underdogs plan.

  I perused the small dossier Jax prepared on our landing site. It was in North America, just on the edge of the Great Plains before the countryside blended into the hilly waves of the Ohio Valley. Jax would have a more exact location the closer we got, but I wasn’t worried. Mostly because I couldn’t change anything if I wanted to, at least not in a way that wouldn’t kill me.

  The host of images attached were of much more interest to me. They were a mixture of stills pulled from Valkyrie’s sensors and decrypted archival data from the observation platform. Jax had managed the file transfer and had snagged some of the more innocuous shots for me to check out. There were a dozen or so shots of our expected point of impact—er, landing—and twice as many images of the larger continent. There were even a few of the other continents.

  It painted an interesting picture.

  Old photographs of Earth from the dawn of the space age tend to show a world lit against the darkness. I’ve seen thousands of them, from hi-res satellite imagery showing the interconnected lines of city lights stretching hundreds of miles to the sapphire smudge Carl Sagan movingly spoke about as our Pale Blue Dot.

  This Earth was not that Earth.

  Every coast was festooned with sharp lines of white. Closer inspection revealed these to be Gaethe settlements. Our interaction with other space-faring races gave us a better understanding of the invaders, so I knew what I was looking at. It was the scope that threw me. Gaethe construction didn’t originate in building a thing, but in growing it. The wide white strips were vast cities outlining the world. I tried to estimate how many Gaethe must live in them and gave up. Probably hundreds of millions if not billions.

  Less terrifying were the strange patches of black found in almost every image. The cities seemed clear of it, but what looked like black powder lay in drifts in the close-ups, and in huge dustings across the long shots, like inverted snow. The cities were a familiar thing, something I could wrap my head around, but the black stuff was new. With no context I could only guess it was a by-product of Gaethe technology. An industrial waste, maybe.

  Jax beeped to alert me we were on our final approach. I scanned over the updates in my feed and saw that automated repairs managed to shore up the gravity drive enough to boost its effectiveness. Jax was being conservative, slowly increasing the strength of the tether, rather than jumping up the power all at once. It was working; we lost speed in just the right way.

  The trick would be to tilt the wings just as our velocity decreased to the point where they’d no longer give us lift anyway. By using the wings as brakes and blowing the orbital maneuvering thrusters at the last second to slow us down, we should hit
the ground at a survivable speed.

  Indeed, it worked out exactly that way. Jax did his thing, slowed us down, and just as the Val drifted at the perfect angle to use a huge pile of the black powder to absorb the shock of impact, that goddamn scout ship shrieked overhead and fired at me.

  I could tell you the spray of projectiles hit my ship and knocked me out of the air. Or that a wash of thruster burn from the scout vessel caught me and tossed me to the ground like an angry giant. I won’t, though, because that would lying.

  The embarrassing truth is this: I still had the yoke in my hands and the emergency propulsion system was still on. Whether on instinct or accident, my hands hit the switch to activate the maneuvering thrusters, which were pointed directly forward. In that instant I managed to kill nearly all forward momentum and the Val dropped like a stone. Granted that stone was having some of its weight negated by the gravity drive, but it was still a rough fall.

  My saving grace was that black snow all over the place. The ship slammed into a drift of it much thicker than it looked from the air. The force of the landing ripped loose pieces of the Val away, a myriad of Very Bad Sounds echoing dully through the fluid around me. I ignored the new warnings Jax fed me and focused on trying not to die.

  The black stuff cushioned the fall only so much, because when I hit the ground I fucking knew it.

  I was slammed forward in my gel surroundings, hard enough that the stuff wasn’t able to absorb the full impact. My survival suit kept me from wrecking myself on the extended controls, though I felt a few of the ceramic plates on my left shoulder joint crack and shatter. My body pressed against the wall of the pod as Val rolled, the crunching black stuff around her helping shed the momentum.

  Then we were stopped. Still. No longer in motion. It was an unusual, almost surreal thing for me in the context of my ship. The whole point of what I did was to dart from here to there, and crashing was frowned upon.

  All of the exterior video feeds were dark, which made sense given the mound we’d plowed into, so when Jax sent a master alert on top of every other background alarm, it was impossible to miss.

  The pod was broken. Fluid was leaking out too fast for automated repair. Since we were in atmosphere, the stuff wouldn’t harden and freeze to seal the breaches. Since the stuff in my helmet was replenished by the fluid in my pod, this was a problem.

  Number one on the list of problems I had at that moment was the need to breathe, and that was a sort of blessing. Being stuck with a broken ship, an aggressive enemy, and no way to communicate with home threatened to overwhelm me. Needing to exit the ship to vent my helmet gave me a good place to start.

  Jax pumped as much of the gel back into the tanks as he could, then popped the pod’s canopy. I expected a rain of black powder and was relieved to be wrong. Whatever the stuff was, it was easily blown away by the burst of released nitrogen as the canopy locks blew.

  I jumped free, my survival suit boosting my reflexes and strength, and landed in a thigh-deep drift of dark powder. It ground against the outside of my suit less like a powder and more like sand. It wasn’t very dense or heavy, though, and I made it to open ground in less than a minute.

  There wasn’t a deadly press for time. My suit held enough oxygenated liquid to cover my needs for several hours. The problem was the scout ship; if I was captured or being chased, I didn’t want to go through changing over to breathing normally when time might be a factor.

  The helmet released with a mental command, and I yanked it off my head. Normal procedure was to vent the liquid slowly, but I didn’t have time for that. Not with the scout ship on my ass.

  Every ounce of the stuff poured down my suit and across the ground. I spit out a mouthful and closed my eyes as I took a huge, deliberate breath. I knew intellectually what was about to happen. Training and experience can do a lot, but there are limits. Knowing I wasn’t about to suffocate was all well and good, but I couldn’t convince my frightened animal instincts of it.

  Besides which, it hurt. A lot.

  The next thirty seconds were unpleasant in ways usually reserved for biblical judgments. Imagine the worst night of drinking you’ve ever had and the deep, soul-shattering vomiting that comes with it. You’re upchucking so hard you’re pretty sure bone marrow is coming out, and every second is a nightmare with death seen as a pretty solid way out. Combine that with a sense that you can’t breathe, your lungs burning with spasms as your chest muscles cramp as tight as they’ll go.

  I like to think of it like I’m a man-sized tube of epoxy and God is squeezing me for every last gram I have.

  The relief at the end is almost orgasmic. I took a deep, ragged breath and coughed violently for a few seconds. Another breath, less coughing. A third, and I managed to keep it steady. Sometime during the hellish transition, I’d fallen to my hands and knees. After steadying myself, I rose to my feet slowly.

  It was dark, but not completely. A half-moon hung in the sky and to my enhanced eyes the world was clear. My senses adjusted quickly, and I was assaulted by them. Smells I had no understanding of crowded my nose. The sound of wind wove with the clatter of tree branches hitting each other, harmonized by the whispering of blown grass. I felt it on my skin. In front of my eyes were the shapes of living things, themselves a thin film of life clinging to the bedrock of a planet.

  Our planet.

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m actually here.”

  And for the first time, I looked at the night sky from Earth. I felt an instant of profound connection with every human who had come before. Even though none of them was my ancestor, my genes being a curated blend, the understanding in that moment made every one of them as close as family. How could you look into that gorgeous, starry abyss from your home and not feel wonder? Generations had done the same, looking up at the twinkling lights and bathing in the awe of it.

  It was a hell of a bad way to achieve my dream, but in that moment I didn’t care. I wasn’t at the head of a victorious army reclaiming the planet. No adoring crowds waited for me. I was stranded and alone, but even in the face of a literal world of problems, I found myself unable to care about how I’d gotten here.

  Because I was home.

  Ten

  I didn’t just stand around with my thumb up my ass and stare at the sky, though. Sure, I had my moment, but it was just that. I fell in love with Earth the way you fall in love with a person; in a flash of overwhelming emotion and a long simmer in the background while real life forces you to get things done.

  “Status update,” I said to Jax. Talking was easier and faster than focusing my thoughts at him.

  The ship isn’t moving on its own without a complete overhaul.

  I waded back through the black sand and cleared away a swath of the stuff just forward of my pod. A subtle seam in the hull was barely visible and was blessedly free of damage. I tapped the center of the panel and Jax obliged me by popping its seals.

  A pair of oblong cases filled every cubic centimeter of the space. I grabbed both and hauled them out.

  “Where’s the scout ship?” I asked. “Is the reactor still working?”

  The sensors are being disrupted somehow. I believe the enemy vessel is using some sort of electromagnetic saturation to overwhelm the sensors. Reading hundreds of millions of discrete, weak signals. Likely a variation on chaff jamming. The reactor is fully functional.

  “Is the ignition system charged?” I asked. “Can we restart?”

  Yes. You are concerned the compromised hull will allow its heat signature to be detected?

  “Yeah. Shut it down, and move all the data to external storage. Leave nothing in there.”

  At once.

  Jax threw a couple status bars up in the corner of my vision as I worked. The reactor was easy; without constant babying, fusion stopped all on its own. A controlled shut down meant venting plasma safely, wicking away the heat, and generally not melting the ship in the process. The data transfer would be harder since he’d have to clone every b
it of data onto a drive I could take with me. I wasn’t about to risk letting the Gaethe figure out where UEE was by reading anything on my ship.

  Worst case scenario, the bad guys would find the Valkyrie and strip her down. Wouldn’t do them any good. If I was lucky enough to keep the ship hidden, then I could reinstall everything from the external drive. Assuming a host of fortunate events transpired in the meantime, like somehow managing to make the Val capable of flight.

  While Jax managed the shut down, I worked on my own survival. I opened the first of the two cases, the one with a green seal on it. Inside was a pack designed to attach to my suit. It held all the things I’d need to stay alive in the short-to-medium term. Rations, some tools, a tiny but powerful water purification system, even a lining that doubled as a stretchy sleeping bag.

  You can make all the technological advancements in the universe, but so long as a species has a physical body, there are unavoidable realities when it comes to needs. The pack and my suit took care of many of them; so long as the suit batteries lasted I would be warm and dry. I had food and water.

  The second case rounded out my needs in the form of a long, sleek gun in several pieces. I snapped them together awkwardly and slung it over my shoulder. I clipped the extra ammunition at my waist, magnetic couplings doing most of the work for me.

  Transfer complete.

  I trudged back up to the ship and retrieved the small, shielded drive. My suit had an armored space designed to hold it. After that I put the canopy back on and did my best to cover the Val with black sand. The stuff was bizarre, not behaving the way I expected it to. I’ve been on airless moons crusted with regolith and fiddled with samples from different worlds before. Ceres even has actual sand from Earth in one of its large biology bays. This stuff wasn’t that.

  It managed to stick together without clumping. Covering the ship was closer to sculpting than burying. The whole job was surprisingly fast and easy. When I was done, I set out toward the east, leaving the Valkyrie behind.